Deadline is a really great web-based alternative to the standard desktop to-do apps. There are several ways to interact with it and access your to-do list, including via Jabber/Google Talk, through Atom, RSS and iCal feeds, and email. Deadline understands input in natural language, so you can write something like, “call mom on Tuesday,” and the web app will schedule it appropriately.
The Deadline UI is well-designed and not distracting, with edit and delete buttons readily accessible next to each item. Inspired by Twitter, to-do items have a 140 character cap to accomodate SMS support (which is forthcoming for Deadline, but not quite there yet). The 140 limitation doesn’t have much practical effect, because date, time and location information can be submitted through brief natural language, no fancy syntax involved. There’s an XML API, too, if you want to experiment with Deadline yourself.
In preparation for the NXE launch this Wednesday, Xbox.com and the Xbox forums will go offline for about four hours starting at 12:01AM Pacific today, Nov. 18.
According to Major Nelson, this will “NOT” affect Xbox Live and service should remain (relatively) reliable. If things do go wrong with the Live service, be sure to leave little love letters to Microsoft in the comments below.
If you read our quick first impressions of the Left 4 Dead demo, you may remember us saying, “…we know a lot of PC gamers won’t like the fact that in order to enter or launch an online multiplayer game they will have to go through a console-like user interface rather than Valve’s more traditional server browser.” As it turned out we were right on the money with that assumption. Fans were upset that Valve’s online match-making service was not up to their expectations.
However, one of the cool things about both Valve and its Steam service is that Valve can quickly issue patches for their games and they have done just that for Left 4 Dead. If you want the traditional server browser you can now access it via the developer console. In the menu access Options, then Keyboard/Mouse, and then enable the Developer Console. After that hit your ~ key on your keyboard which should enable the dev console. After that type in “openserverbrowser” and you should see what’s in our screenshot; a very familiar looking server browser.
We’ve seen lots of controller mods around here. We’ve seen voice recognition controllers. We’ve seen controllers with hidden buttons. Until now though, we hadn’t seen a controller with no buttons. Okay, technically it does have the start, back and Guide buttons, but just follow along, mkay? The mod you see above — created by one Mactastic Mendez — uses tiny digital joysticks located under the controller for face button input. How does all of work? It’s quite simple really: magic. Well, that, a soldering iron, and some handy crafting skills. Check out a video of the controller in action after the break. Then head over to AcidMods to see how it was made.
Oh wow! After a great deal of delay I’ve FINALLY got my sterling silver jewelry site up on its feet! I’ve had ArchmailleDesigns.com for 2 years (almost exactly registered the site on 09/19/2006) The site has grown, changed, fallen, and risen over the last two years… but never before has anything so epic been achieved with the site as the newest jewelry listings addition to the site! I was looking for a way to add value to my customers, because lets face it I don’t really get enough sales to really make a “living” from the site. So I wanted to add some sort of knowledge base like the big jewelry sites that rank for terms like sterling silver jewelry do and what not. I wanted to push past the things that have been holding the site back, and really make it take off! So after much pondering, and head scratching I finally found a way to add value, knowledge, and expertise to the site, while gaining as much value for myself at the same time! I came up with the jewelry directory, which I’ve poured TONS of time into, and want to see it get great kudos here within the next couple of weeks. Anyways, we’ll see how things get going, and how long it takes before things really start taking off!
This new jewelry directory is structured exactly like the computer information directory here on this site! So if you’ve benefited from the computer directory maybe you should take some tips from the jewelry directory and get your girl something special I’m sure she’ll appreciate your thoughtfulness
Several analysts have been lowering their expectations for iPhone sales during the first quarter of 2009, pointing to possible cuts in the number of units manufactured, according to a series of articles by Cult of Mac’s Ed Sutherland.
Barclays Capital today cut its estimate of iPhone sales to 5 million handsets, down from 6.2 million. Yesterday, BMO Capital lowered its expectations to a slightly-better 5.6 million units, but still down from an earlier estimate of 6.6 million.
On Wednesday, UBS said iPhone production could drop to 6.7 million units, down from 9 million in the last quarter. Earlier this week, FBR Capital Markets analyst Craig Berger said that Apple could have already cut iPhone production by 40 percent.
Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes suggested that Apple could cut prices on iPhones and develop a new low-end handset to stimulate sales, taking the lead from how the iPod and iPod mini sold.
Reitzes also speculated that a low-cost laptop could sell 3.5 million units per year. It’s unclear if Apple will take Reitzes’ advice, as Steve Jobs said at last month’s laptop event that “We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.”
Alright, so I wrote about how I was going to xpand the directory on kclanparty.org right? Well it is finished! The expansion took place, and didn’t quite meet my goal, but is close enough that it works out. I went from somewhere around 9k pages to 28,192 pages so we’re looking at a pretty good expanse still! Now if Google indexes it by Saturday I will be one happy camper… if not… well… we’re in a little bit of trouble
It kind of sucks because I made it all alphabetical, it never used to be alphabetical, sort of random, so a lot of the stuff isn’t in the same directory listings, so promotions will have to take place… like majorly! I’ll start that tomorrow I hope, get it in the system by Friday, and indexing everything by Saturday… who knows, it just might work!
YouTube has been busy adding new features to its service. One of the coolest features is the new “auto translate” option for videos with captions or subtitles.
Because 44 percent of YouTube users watch content from an embedded video, rather than the YouTube site, YouTube is also improving the embeddable player. The start images are now higher quality, which makes it easier to tell what you will actually be watching. Additionally, you can now search for other videos through the embedded player and then view those videos in the same player window.
The newer video annotation feature is now available to viewers using embedded players, as are closed captions and captioning translations.
YouTube is still behind Vimeo and Viddler on the video quality front, but they are now starting to catch up, feature wise.
Last week, Gmail Labs briefly added the ability to send SMS text messages directly from Gmail. Unfortunately, the feature isn’t fully baked, and Google pulled it until it is rock solid, so look for it in about a week. In the meantime, Google has added some functionality to the custom Gmail button on the Google Toolbar. Now, not only can you check your mail from the Toolbar (you have to add the Gmail button in the Toolbar preferences), you can also easily send a web page or a bit of text to someone else, using Gmail. Click on the “Send To” button and a new window will open up with a new message, complete with the page link and any text you have highlighted. You can then automatically send it to any of your Google contacts.
Google gadgets can also be added to the Toolbar, which can be especially helpful if you use Google Calendar and want to stay update of all of your events, without having Gmail open 24/7.
Although Google Docs does not currently support Microsoft’s Office Open XML file format (the *.docx, *.xslx, *.pptx extensions that debuted with Office 2007), you can now view those attachments as HTML files within Gmail and Google Search.
Hopefully, this is a sign that full support for Open XML files will be coming to Google Docs soon. As more and more people upgrade to either Office 2007 or Office 2008 (Mac), the *.docx format is going to become more common. With so many big companies competing for the online office space, it is imperative that Google keep up.
On Monday, Google pushed out the first update to its web browser, Chrome. Brad discussed some of the changes and improvements last week and the Chromium Blog went into some detail on some of the causes and solutions to some of the problems with the first beta.
The newest version of Chrome has better performance with large PDF files and Flash video, as well as other bugs and security fixes.
Random Google News that didn’t quite make the Googleholic cut:
New Google Help Forums - Google is revamping its Help Forums
AdSense Improves ad quality - Google has rolled out improvements to Ad Sense’s Quality Scorecard and Ad Rank systems.
Street View expands - Baltimore, DC and Seattle residents now join the ranks of Street View cities.
KML Handbook now available - If you have wanted to learn more about Google’s KML markup language, which is what powers Google Maps, a new officially endorsed KML Handbook is available now.
Android source management tools - I didn’t post about this in Googleholic, because Android or not, this gets pretty specific and geeky, but the Google Open Source blog details the two tools Android uses for source code management, and explains why its tools (which were also released open source) are better than existing solutions, like Git, for this type of project.
OpenSocial Birthday Party details - On Thursday, November 13, Google’s OpenSocial platform is celebrating its first birthday with an official event at MySpace’s San Francisco offices. This blog post details the agenda for the event. Incidentally, my 26th birthday is on Wednesday, November 12. (yes, that is me shamelessly plugging my birthday)
Whether you’re looking to get a little more pizazz out of your wig stands or simply hope to scare family members with your devotion to all things Gears of War, we’re certain you can find a spot in your house (and your heart) for this charming and oversized Locust Drone bust. The folks at Project Triforce will start shipping out these 20lb monsters before the end of the year.
Joking aside, the only scary thing about this toothy guy is the fact that he’s far from being a low-cost locust. The chance to own this snarling mix of Emperor Palpatine and Alien Nation’s Det. Sam Francisco will set you back $550.
After toying with our heartstrings for like, ever, Dell finally gathered up the courage to formally introduce its 12-inch netbook late last month. After arriving at the testing facilities of Laptop Mag, critics quickly found a lot to love about the relatively expansive display, “excellent” battery life and spacious keyboard. In all fairness, there really wasn’t anything to complain about on the surface; the first kvetching we heard was soon after bootup — er, a fair while after bootup, we should say. The biggest knock on Dell’s Mini 12 was its sluggish performance under Vista, not to mention the lethargic hard drive shoved in there. In sum, critics frankly pointed out that the “Mini 12 doesn’t have the right hardware to handle this OS,” and recommended holding off for one with WinXP / Ubuntu if you were dead set on the design.
I’m sure she’ll appreciate your thoughtfulness 
Several analysts have been lowering their expectations for iPhone sales during the first quarter of 2009, pointing to possible cuts in the number of units manufactured, according to a series of articles by Cult of Mac’s Ed Sutherland.
Whether you’re looking to get a little more pizazz out of your wig stands or simply hope to scare family members with your devotion to all things Gears of War, we’re certain you can find a spot in your house (and your heart) for this charming and oversized Locust Drone bust. The folks at Project Triforce will start shipping out these 20lb monsters before the end of the year.
After toying with our heartstrings for like, ever, Dell finally gathered up the courage to formally introduce its 12-inch netbook late last month. After arriving at the testing facilities of Laptop Mag, critics quickly found a lot to love about the relatively expansive display, “excellent” battery life and spacious keyboard. In all fairness, there really wasn’t anything to complain about on the surface; the first kvetching we heard was soon after bootup — er, a fair while after bootup, we should say. The biggest knock on Dell’s Mini 12 was its sluggish performance under Vista, not to mention the lethargic hard drive shoved in there. In sum, critics frankly pointed out that the “Mini 12 doesn’t have the right hardware to handle this OS,” and recommended holding off for one with WinXP / Ubuntu if you were dead set on the design.
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